This whole us vs them, as if everyone in north Korea is equally culpable for everything the fuckers at the top do… it’s down right primitive.
You guys sound like bronze age sheep herders talking about the tribe next door.
This is 2013, right? Or did I time warp to 1500 BC?
You vastly underestimate the military threat that NK poses to the south. Just because they’re poor and starving doesn’t mean they’re so backwards that they can’t inflict the greatest one day or one week slaughter in the history of humanity, because they can.
The artillery is massively hardened against conventional attack. They’ve had nothing to do for 50 years but do that. Your conventional attacks would get them at a slow, grueling pace while one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the world is destroyed by more destructive power than any attack in history. How many millions of South Koreans, who are our allies and who we have an ethical and legal obligation to defend, are you willing to let die for the sake of your smug moral superiority?
Even nuclear attack wouldn’t be able to completely destroy that threat in a timely manner, but it would do job orders of magnitude better than conventional attack.
The idea that people simply want vengeance to kill a bunch of north Koreans is your own imagination. If a nation state has the power to inflict the greatest slaughter ever seen by humanity, and they are crazy enough, and in this scenario, likely enough to do it, then being able but unwilling to put a stop to it would be one of the greatest evil misuses of power the world has ever seen. To do it in the name of humanitarian reasons is quite ridiculous.
Who the fuck are the “you guys” in this thread? You are projecting these emotions from whole cloth. No one is posting about how they want to kill all the civilians they can because they’re bloodthirsty. People are talking about taking out NK because of the threat they possess.
The accusations you throw around in this thread are quite frankly childish, and it’s ironic because you’re advocating for the position that would be most likely to result in the greatest number of deaths.
I don’t even know what good nuclear weapons would be. I’m looking at google maps. Assuming that the artillery is near the border, you’d need a lot of warheads to take them out, and you’d probably kill as many South Koreans as you would North Koreans.
Basically the time to do something about North Korea, was a long time ago. If they wanted to kill a whole mess of South Koreans, they can now. With impunity.
Nuking their population centers would be exactly what you claim is just in my imagination: Revenge.
The poll is badly designed. I took “Pyongyang glowing by night” as a general answer for a nuclear attack on Korea, rather than a specific retaliatory attack designed to kill civilians. The intent of the poll is to contrast the nuclear and non-nuclear options, so I assume “nuclear targeting their offensive capabilities” is on the table.
And yes, South Koreans hurt by the nuclear strikes is a concern. You could use mostly tactical weapons close to the border to minimize the direct damage, but people would be exposed to fallout. The deaths would probably be in the tens of thousands range. That sucks, but the alternative is to subject them to a slaughter far greater than the artillery barrages of the Somme or the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
THOSE are these guys in this thread.
Ok, so we don’t disagree. Target military outposts and artillery with whatever is necessary to get them non-operational.
I assume you’d want the heads of state killed by precision strikes.
But we don’t nuke all the population centers or “Pave North Korea”, right?
THAT is what I was dead set against, and you seemed to be defending, until your last post, at least.
I think the US should pull a Nelson: point at N. Korea and say,“Ha! Ha!”
Just a wild guess, but if North Korea tried that, I would imagine the vast majority of Asian countries would not be exactly pleased. There is already no love lost between Japan and North Korea, and of course South Korea would find this a tad unsettling, as well as Taiwan and multiple other nearby countries. The big question is how China would react - and my guess is even they would say, “Fuck 'em…we tried but can’t keep the lid on that asshole.”
So, I hardly think it would be just the USA up in arms and ready to go - I think we would have a hardy, large group of people ready to go in there and put a major kibosh on any future attempts. Let’s just say there will be a long line of countries ready and willing to go in and put a stop to this in short order.
I wouldn’t be overly concerned with reducing damage to the NK population, but I wouldn’t target them deliberately. If there was a choice between leaving an offensive military capability alive for the sake of preserving their civilians, I would hit the target. People really underestimate the damage NK could do. Yes, they’re backwards as all hell, and they could never invade the south, but they could kill on a scale only rivaled in total numbers by the world wars. There’s no need to be punitive towards their population, but my absolute overriding priority would be to stop NK from being a threat to the world.
Use smaller nukes on NK’s long range artillery and missiles that they have near the SK border. Massive airstrikes against all their other military installations and manufacturing plants. Preferably with international support, though obviously we’d be doing most of the bombing. Not sure about a ground invasion, though that might be a thing if China tacitly washes it’s hands.
If we don’t strike back hard, he’ll just do it again, maybe succeeding.
Dropping a nuke does not mean “three million innocent people dead”. It doesn’t mean “pave North Korea”. Not every nuclear weapon in the US’ arsenal is a 50 MT Czar Bomba. We’re not going to be raining nuclear death down on the Pyongyang suburbs just for the fun of it - we’re going to be launching tactical nukes to decapitate the DPRK leadership, and in the process we’ll be killing fewer people than a conventional bombing campaign would.
I’d actually be more in favor of making Pyongang bounce than a nuclear strike against the hardened artillery sites threatening Seoul. I’m pretty sure that even ‘baby’ nukes would cause a significant amount of damage and death in Seoul.
Plus, I’d assume that the artillery emplacements would go on high alert when the missile was launched - so they’re going to start pounding Seoul anyway at the first sign of an American counterattack. And even using the B2, we aren’t going to get them all before they notice we’ve started the retaliation, unless we use something big enough that we take out Seoul ourselves.
Hey, I take umbrage at that!
—— Sissy/not damn straight
Jesus, do any of you realize the implications of what you are saying? That, in “turning Pyongyang into a parking lot,” the US would be sacrificing only only North Korean citizens who have zero influence over their autocratic government but also citizens of a concerted ally? This would be like, Canada going to war with Great Britain, and the British sending D-5s to nuke Vancouver, Winnepeg, Ottowa, and Montreal, knowing that the fallout would cover Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, and the US Eastern Seaboard. We would regard this, quite rightly, as an attack on the United States.
And this highlights the entire problem with nuclear deterrence; that, if it fails once at acutally deterring a single attack, it may fail completely, resulting in escallation and a response demanding complete annihilation, regardless of the minimum is necessary to ensure security. A more rationale response would be to focus an attack which disables the infrastructure necessary to eliminate the threat while minimizing non-combattant casualties, especially those of non-aligned or allied nations.
Stranger
Going slightly “offtopic”:
Where & when has the “hearts & minds” approach worked? The humanist in me wishes we could, but the cynic in me can’t think of too many cases of this working…
I’m sure China would love to see a few dozen warheads coming their way. “Don’t worry. We’re just nuking your neighbour, honest! Nevermind the fallout.” What could possibly go wrong?
Just drop Seal Team 6 on them, problem solved.
No worries. We’re talking about tactical nukes. You just launch them and your intended target goes boom. There are no after-effects or long-term consequences.